Cat’s Cradle — Kurt Vonnegut — Contents
I asked the driver who the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy had been. The boulevard we were going down, I saw, was called the Boulevard of the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy.
The driver told me that San Lorenzo had declared war on Germany and Japan an hour after Pearl Harbor was attacked.
San Lorenzo conscripted a hundred men to fight on the side of democracy. These hundred men were put on a ship bound for the United States, where they were to be armed and trained.
The ship was sunk by a German submarine right outside of Bolivar harbor.
“Dose, sore,” he said, “yeeara lo hoon-yera mora-toorz tut zamoo-cratz-ya.”
“Those, sir,” he’d said in dialect, “are the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy.”